November 07,
2012 "Information
Clearing House"
-
Vast social revolutions and wars are often preceded by periods
of giving up on reforms, despairing withdrawal from public life
by the best and brightest, and even peacefulness which seems to
have become the normal condition in spite of deep conflicts and
growing crises beneath the surfaces of public life. Often,
earlier periods of intense conflicts and crises have been
overcome and resolved, so it comes to look like that is the
normal in life. This lulls most people into assuming their worse
fears cannot happen, but this leads them to lowering their
guards against growing conflicts and crises, so small ones can
more easily cascade down into massive ones. If people expected
they could become vast wars or revolutions or implosions, they
would take more precautions to prevent that. But when lulled in
expecting the worst cannot happen, the worst than they could
ever imagine often explodes suddenly.

The
cataclysmic French Revolution came after many decades of
attempted reforms and conflicts which people had come to think
of as unending. It started with new attempts at reforms, then
incidents that did not seem so important, then all of it a
sudden it exploded. WWI came after so many decades of peace in
Europe, in spite of imperial conflicts around the world and an
arms race, that most people thought a major war was impossible.
Then a single murder in the far away Balkans set in motion an
explosive cascade of events that led to a cataclysmic war. The
Russian Revolution was preceded by such a long "lull" encouraged
by European peace and reforms by the tsar that even Lenin was
near despair and was living abroad. After several years of WWI
and growing poverty at home, the Russian front imploded and a
small event at home triggered a revolution that started small
and democratic and then exploded into one of the vastest social
revolutions in history. The beginning of WWII on the crucial
German-French front was so quiet for so many months after France
and Britain had declared war on Germany after it invaded Poland
that it was called the "Sitzen Krieg" in Germany, the sit-down
war, then it exploded as Germany invaded through the Ardennes.
This was repeated near the end of the war as Germany built up
its forces secretly for attacking through the Ardennes again.

The American
Revolution looked very unlikely until that fateful British march
to Concord and Lexington to enforce gun control laws. Then it
exploded. The conflicts between the North and South had been so
intense for so many decades, off and on, and then resolved again
and again by major compromises that the Ante-Bellum period of
the 1850's seemed another replay of that scenario. Then all of a
sudden there was a small incident near Charleston, moves to
secession, calling up the Northern troops and an explosion of
war vastly more ghastly than Americans imagined possible. War
between Japan and Germany and the U.S. had been put off so many
times and so long that Pearl Harbor came as quite a shock to
most Americans. The 9/11 attacks on the U.S. were just as
shocking all over again.

In the early
years of this new century, the U.S. had used soaring paper money
and paper-asset inflation to fuel a great Bubble and apparent
"prosperity" over twenty years and repeated crises [1980, 1987,
1990, 2000] were ended by pumping out more paper money and
inflating assets [both paper and houses after the Nasdaq Crash
in 2000] that the Fed and almost all economists and Bankers and
speculators declared we had entered an Age of The Great
Moderation in which financial crises were impossible, as
Bernanke declared with gusto. Then housing and stocks started
slowly cascading down, then did so more rapidly, then one Big
Bank was hit by a sudden crisis and had to be "saved" from
implosion, then others followed, then suddenly one weekend
Lehman imploded and the the whole top of the U.S. financial
system imploded and had to be taken over by the U.S. to save it
from what looked like total implosion. The Great Moderation was
suddenly replaced by The Greatest Global Financial Crisis in
history. Europe and the rest of the world soon followed the U.S.
into growing crisis.

By pouting
out vast and soaring trillions and using vast distortions of the
System [such as Quantitative Easing by the Fed] to hold the
System up, they managed in the past several years to stop the
accelerating cascade down and have kept it bumping along the
bottom in official statistics like the GDP and unemployment,
while the debts and distortions and all the real crises keep
growing. The apparent bump up in the official stats on GDP are
an illusion, below the real rate of inflation for GDP, while
real unemployment and all the other real economic crises keep
growing.

We're now in
a lull before a vast, revolutionary storm. The U.S. is sinking
faster and faster in all the ways vital to the future of our
society, from the The Great Global Economic-Financial Crisis
which the U.S. produced with insane Big Bank speculations and
corruption to educational decline and bureaucratic strangulation
to losing imperials wars around the world to political deadlock.
I'm sure any intelligent American who is honest with himself can
quickly write down a long list of the crucial ways in which the
U.S. is declining now. Maybe half of Americans are too ignorant
about the world or lack the intelligence to see all of this Big
Picture of Crisis and Decline. They are confused and mad and
despairing and see no way out, but assume the Republicrat System
will go on and on and are trying merely to fit in and keep or
get a job with a livable wage for them and their families. Even
some knowledgeable and intelligent people see what is happening
but see no exit and despair and simply withdraw and hide from it
all, implicitly or explicitly assuming The System will just keep
getting worse and worse and never end.

But nations,
like individuals and groups and companies, cannot simply drift
downward faster and faster into worse and worse crises they
patch up but cannot escape or reverse. We've been doing that now
for decades, as France and Russia did before their vast social
Revolutions, as the nations did during long decades of peaceful
imperial conflicts before the utterly immense conflicts of the
American Civil War, WWI and WWII. There comes a time finally
when the accelerating crises and sufferings and rages become too
much to bear and something, often a seemingly small event like a
murder of a young man in the Balkans, or an attack by "hotheads"
on a small fort near Charleston, sets off an explosive cascade
of events that quickly leads to a vast social explosion.

The U.S. is
now rushing downward along all vital dimensions of social life.
If this continues much longer, the U.S. will simply implode and
that will lead to vast social revolution or revolutions. But
maybe the vast social revolution will come before implosion.

The one
thing we can be sure of is that we have sunk so far so long and
are now accelerating down so fast that this cannot continue long
without producing an implosion or a vast social revolution.

Jack D.
Douglas [jddougla@ucsd.edu] is a retired professor of sociology
from the University of California at San Diego. He has published
widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably
The Myth of the Welfare State.

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